In cognitive design we create artifacts that generate specific mental states when seen or used. In addition to core functionality and ease of use, cognitive designs reliably deliver a particular think-and-feel experience. Retro car designs that invoke nostalgia, educational events that generate wonder and websites that help you forge deep personal relationships with others are examples.

But designing think-and-feel experiences that meet deeply felt psychological needs is hard. One reason is that you must understand what other people really think and feel. And that requires something that business have not normally focused on – empathy.

But all that seems to be changing. According to a recent column by Geoff Colvin in Fortune, Employers are Looking for New Hires With Something Extra: Empathy. The author did a quick online search for jobs paying over $100K involving empathetic traits and got a thousand hits with positions from firms ranging from McKinsey to Mars. Brad Smith, CEO of Inuit (a $4B software company) hits it on the head:

Designing emotion into the product is now something you really have to think about explicitly and measure yourself against”.

This is a big claim from a technology company and one that signals cognitive design is starting to move into the mainstream.

Tremendous time and energy is spent trying to generate good ideas for start-ups and corporate innovation processes. Indeed, some consultants make a living helping others try and figure it out. Fortunately, we all ready know how to do it. It is not easy but the concept is simple.

….

Paul Graham states it very nicely when he writes that we should focus on a problem we have first hand experience with and pick something:

We want ourselves

We can build

Few others see as worthwhile.

Many entrepreneurs and innovators I know support this insight. Its a bit like the nose on your face.

Psychology Press recently launched a Century of Knowledge in Cognitive Science, offering readers free online access to nearly 2000 titles for the month of June. Some of the titles will be useful to cognitive designers. For example, check out the practical insights in the areas ofdecision-making or anxiety, two major cognitive design challenges.

You get complete access to the book from your browser. Check them out and reply to this post with titles especially relevant for designers and innovators.

Explaining basic concepts in a simple, compelling and even inspirational way, is hard to do. Doing it well requires some insight into the nature of communication and cognition. So I am always on the lookout for interesting new examples. Check out Physics Girl’s entry to the What is Color? contest.

We watch a lot of movies. Collecting data on the movies we watch and how we react to them might provide some insights into preferences, mental models and psychological needs that are useful for cognitive designers.

So I am always on the look out for new studies on the psychology of films. For example, early this year, The Atlantic Magazine published an interesting article on How Netflix Reverse Engineers Hollywood. Through a combination of journalism and text mining the author claims to have discovered that Netflix uses nearly 77,000 genres to drive its recommendation engine. These place movies into extremely specific categories that represent a narrow but useful viewer psychographic. Some examples: Evil kid horror movies , visually striking nostalgic foreign dramas and gritty suspenseful revenge westerns. They also include a list of Netflix’s favorite movie subjects that include, at the very top of the list, movies about marriage and royalty.

Tagging (categorizing) all of these movies is a big investment for Netflix. They use a combination of human and machine intelligence to do the work. The article states:

“Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.”

This made me wonder if this would in fact be a great learning exercise for students of film. They could do the tagging work as a way to learn about films and at the same time generate a lot of commercially useful meta-data. I explore how this might work in general in my post on learning labor.

In cognitive design we seek insights into how minds work so that we can create features and functions that motivate, inspire, inform, entertain and otherwise deliver positive mental performances.

A systematic approach to cognitive design usually takes one of three forms: Look at what the science tells us, study design patterns that dazzle our brains or explore the implications of mind-intense philosophies or belief systems. My work has been focused on the first two approaches. After all, scientific insights into how minds actually work and products/services that push our emotional and intellectual buttons have proliferated wildly over the last 30 years. Behavioral economics, emotional design, serious games, neuromarketing and other areas have emerged as a result.

Over the years I have been challenged (usually by one of my students at Northwestern), to consider the third approach and explore how a particular mind-intense philosophy or belief system can inform cognitive design practices. Examples include Yoga, martial arts and religion. Such domains offer unique insights into cognition and promise powerful psychological experiences – for example alignment, clarity and faith – that are sought by millions.

Perhaps these ancient practices and sources of wisdom are just as rich of source of insights for cognitive designers as our modern sciences and marketing phenoms such as Harry Potter are.

Take Yoga for example. Yoga offers insight into the nature of specific types of mental states, how to achieve them and why they are important. This raises a number of interesting questions for cognitive designers:

How can yoga wisdom inspire the design of our products and services? Can it be used to inform employee and leadership development? How about the design of our workspaces and grounds? How does yoga fit in with your business ethics program?

A quick Google reveals clothes, jewelry, pottery, room interiors and other products and services that claim to be Yoga-inspired. And Yoga has clearly made some inroads into corporate wellness programs and retreats. But I suspect we have yet to really tap the design potential of Yoga to deliver unique think-and-feel experiences and improved cognitive performances into the mass market.

This belief was reinforced by a project I recently completed with Jamie and Maren Showkier to summarize their excellent book Yoga Wisdom at Work into a deck of NewHabits cards for the iPhone. The project gave me a small personal taste of the design potential Yoga wisdom holds. As the authors explain:

“Many people already know that yoga stretches and meditation can benefit them at work. This app centers on helping people create habits based on other yoga practices that strengthen ethics, self-discipline, focus, self-awareness, productivity, contentment, and taking individual accountability for the good of the whole.”

Several colleagues that have experimented with the deck asked: How can we combine design thinking with Yoga Wisdom? That is, how can we take a systematic yet creative approach to unleashing the insights Yoga has into the workings of our minds to reshape our products, services and organizations?

In cognitive design we spend a lot of time trying to understand what people are really thinking and feeling. We need to understand their mental models, cognitive biases and emotional states so that we can design products and services that meet deeply felt psychological needs. So I am always on the lookout for new scientific insights into how to read others peoples’ minds.

For example, the new book, Mindwise How we Decide What Others Think, Feel and Want, challenges some commonly held assumptions. More specifically, the author argues that popular techniques of reading gestures or body language and trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes (imagine their situation) are not useful. Indeed, he argues that we are wildly over confident in our belief that we can know what other people are thinking and feeling.

While the book does not present an alternative for effective reading other minds, it will help you avoid some common pitfalls and provides justification for using the more scientific approaches (e.g. metaphor elicitation and protocol analysis) that we write about in theCognitive Design Blog.

Let’s turn our corporate training/development efforts and university classrooms into learning communities that create structured content and computable knowledge with immediate economic and social value.